Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Nerval's Lobster writes "NoSQL databases sometimes feature a concept called document storage, a way of storing data that differs in radical ways from the means available to traditional relational SQL databases. But what does 'document storage' actually mean, and what are its implications for developers and other IT pros? This SlashBI article focuses on MongoDB; the techniques utilized here are similar in other document-based databases."

Sadly, his post will be missed because everyone's too busy talking about how everything can be done just as easily on a $500,000 server farm running Oracle's latest and greatest turd.

Actually, I was going to talk about how PostgreSQL 9.2 (expected in Q3 of this year) will include JSON support [postgresql.org]. The database also has non-relational key value [postgresql.org] storage, and that feature is even available in Heroku deployments [heroku.com] now.

There are two things PostgreSQL doesn't do as well as MongoDB. It won't do simple key/value lookups quite as fast; I normally eliminate that problem by putting a memcached server in at some level. And you can't split writes among multiple nodes easily yet.